Since its inception four years ago, the Today Public Policy Institute, an autonomous and politically non-partisan, not-for-profit think-tank, produced a range of valuable reports in fulfilment of its declared aim of promoting “wide understanding of strategic issues of national importance and to help in the development of sound public policies”. Subjects have ranged from the environmental deficit to the sustainability of Malta’s social security system to divorce and managing the challenges of irregular immigration.

One wide-ranging report in 2008, entitled Towards A Low Carbon Society: The Nation’s Health, Energy Security And Fossil Fuels, which had set out a number of proposals for improving health and the quality of life of citizens by reducing dependence on the motor car, has now been followed up by the same lead author, George Debono. This time, the study focuses on healthy mobility in Sliema, a locality that could be said to personify all the good and bad characteristics of the impact of the motor car on people’s daily lives.

Healthy Mobility In Sliema: A Case Study makes a range of practical proposals aimed at restoring the social function, urban street environment and quality of life of people, encouraging healthy mobility and reducing urban motor traffic. The underlying purpose of such proposals is to enable the motor car and human beings to inhabit the same tight public space in harmony. The planning arrangements in place appear to favour the car at all costs to the detriment of the people living there, especially, children and the elderly.

The report takes Sliema as an example of the need to improve the traffic situation in many of the island’s localities. It focuses on practical and not necessarily expensive ways to give pedestrians more consideration in the design and refurbishment of roads, trying to ensure that traffic moves freely but safely. It also raises the need for the redistribution of traffic more evenly in some areas to ease pressure points.

At the heart of the report is the need for local councils to carry out a careful traffic/pedestrian audit of their area to see how a rebalancing of priorities between the car, the pedestrian and cyclists can be achieved.

While Sliema is a particularly good example of the urgent need to improve the street environment as a means of encouraging people to walk or cycle, the measures outlined in the report could be said to have relevance to almost every town or village in Malta and Gozo. The proposals also overlap with the increasingly essential emerging concept of providing an “age-friendly environment” that is of great health and social significance to elderly people who are expected to become more numerous and live longer in the coming years.

The essential value of this report is that it covers practical steps to help make towns and villages pedestrian-friendly, to make them safer for such vulnerable groups as children or the elderly and to encourage walking and greater use of the bicycle. Councils in towns and villages all over the Maltese islands are likely to find the proposals in the report helpful to them as they seek to tackle the impact that ever-growing heavy traffic in their areas is having on the quality of life of their citizens.

Mayors and local councils should make use of this report to help them decide on the simple steps, many of which are not expensive to implement, they can take to make the life of residents safer, healthier and more tolerable.

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